The instant invention relates to a sheet feeder and more particularly to the adjustability of the side guides used in a sheet feeder.
Inserting systems in which documents are collected and fed into an envelope are well known. Such systems make substantial use of sheet feeding apparatus in the course of feeding and collecting documents. The inserting systems now used offer more flexibility than their ancestors; in fact, they are prized for their ability to handle a wide variety of sizes of paper. Thus, it is incumbent upon sheet feeders to have sufficient flexibility to adequately process a wide variety of sizes of paper, particularly varying widths of paper.
A sheet feeder can handle a wide variety of paper widths if it has side guides which can be adjusted to handle such variety. Typically, whenever adjustability is built into side guides, what is lost is the rigidity in the side guides which is needed to assure that the side guides remain parallel to the direction of travel of the paper sheets, and parallel to each other. In other words, the flexibility is gained at the expense of rigidity, so that the paper sheets are not necessarily fed across the sheet feeder in the proper alignment.
The instant invention thus overcomes the problems associated with adjustable side guides and provides adjustability to the side guides without a concomitant loss in rigidity of the side guides.